Diary of an Oxygen Thief

After the narrator’s breakup with Pen, he decides he will hurt other girls, in order to make them feel the same pain he feels, which he describes as manifesting physically: “A burning sensation in my chest as if a large smoldering boulder had somehow lodged there overnight” (21). The narrator reflects on each new discomfort he feels, filing the pain away like a scientist. He calls Pen,needing to hate her, but she doesn’t answer.

He meets a twenty-five-year-old teacher from Ireland who is engaged to be married and is embarrassed that she is still a virgin. He thinks of her fiancé and decides to leave her hymen intact but ensure that she will think of him every time she has sex with her husband-to-be. He performs cunnilingus on her for hours and masturbates her, careful not to break her hymen.

He meets Lizzie, “freshly jilted from a long-term relationship and […] very delicate” (24). Lizzie later leaves a message saying the narrator raped her, which the narrator denies in the physical sense, although he believes he might have done so emotionally. He reflects on his alcoholism and karma.

His work as a freelance ad artist is unstable, and so to get more money for alcohol, he raids parties, walking up to places with lights on and music going. He hates people who are well-off because he believes they don’t have to work, remembering how he used to pick frozen beets with old socks for gloves as a kid. He pretends he belongs in these houses, making sure he’s not too obviously drunk. At one party, he meets Jenny, sitting alone and beautiful on a couch, and before long they are kissing. Two weeks later, she throws beer in his face after he nonchalantly tells her he slept with someone else. Jenny then follows him in her car while he drunkenly bikes home, pretending to be riding a horse.

The narrator reflects on how he has perfected “The Smirk” when he tells women hurtful things, which he practiced at The Swan in South London. He remembers drinking all day once and deciding to piss off the guy sitting next to him, who he has been conversing with all day. He mocks him for being from Dublin, and the guy head-butts the narrator, causing blood to drip into the narrator’s drink. The narrator tells the Dubliner that the narrator won’t leave the bar, and the Dubliner looks at him with fury.

The narrator reflects on the other times he has seen someone look at him like that, remembering his bicycle accident. He recalls a woman looking down from a bus, furious at the narrator for making her bus stop while he is worried that he will die or has been maimed. The only other time was Aisling.

The Dubliner looks at the narrator, who finally realizes that he’s been head-butted, and tells him they’ll fight without glasses. The narrator concentrates on not dripping blood on the floor, realizing he is about to get pummeled, but a bouncer grabs the Dubliner. The Dubliner then grabs the narrator, who then clips out of his coat. The Dubliner is ejected, and the narrator’s coat is returned with a free pint of cider.

The narrator remembers a nameless designer after Penny, who makes him and her brothers dinner on Sunday. They smoke weed, which the narrator hates because it makes him paranoid. He has sex with her and never sees her again. He meets newly-single Catherine, who has a daughter and emotional problems. He wants to see if he can make her kill herself, but he is unsuccessful: “she proved too strong or too stupid or both or something” (33). Catherine quickly falls for him and so he vanishes, expecting to hear any day that she has killed herself. But she calls him cheerfully and asks him how he’s doing, which makes him feel worse.

The narrator next recalls being fondled by a priest when he was nine and his mother’s response that “Brother Ollie was only being friendly. It wasn’t serious abuse” (34). He remembers trying to tell his father something once, while the father was shaving, the narrator threatening to never talk to his father again if he didn’t comply with the narrator’s wishes. His father tells him, quietly but emphatically, that he does not care, shaking the narrator to his core. The narrator reflects on how his parents’ apathy might have led to his abusive behavior: “Maybe I was emulating the only relationship I’d ever had by gaining trust and then breaking it abruptly” (36).

The narrator invites his exes to his thirtieth birthday party, held in his back garden. He gets very drunk, at one point drinking alcoholic punch straight from the bowl. Catherine asks if he is alright. He reflects on why he is writing this and that he stopped hurting people because it felt futile: “It went on a while longer until I couldn’t just keep up the act anymore” (37).

The narrator remembers the one time he hit a girl. He leaves a bar with his friend and a girl slaps him, so he punches her. He waits outside for the beating to come, and five acquaintances apologize and then start beating him, at first without passion until he starts mocking them for having British relatives. The narrator later finds out that the girl slapped him because the narrator’s friend “had put his hand up her skirt as he passed behind her, and she assumed I’d done it” (38).

The narrator enters into Alcoholics Anonymous and stays away from women for five years, both of which are beneficial to his career: “I got a job in a renowned advertising agency in London and won awards for the work my creative partner and I did. We were quite famous at one point” (39). He finds corporate politeness draining, although later realizes that London is nothing in comparison to American corporations. The narrator gets sick of pulling his partner’s weight, fantasizing about killing him, although he maintains they split on good terms.

He is approached by a headhunter for Killallon Fitzpatrick, an American agency located in Saint Lacroix, Minnesota, and takes a vacation in France. He charms the interviewer, Graham, by telling him he neither smokes nor drinks and wants to settle down and start a family, the latter of which is decidedly not true but makes him look respectable. He sublets his apartment, moves into a hotel, and waits for a work permit, determined to use the second chance he feels AA has afforded him. He stays with his parents for a little while, buying them a Dictaphone so they can send taped messages to one another, which they never do.

A month into the new job, his mother calls him, and he expects to hear that his father has died, but she explains that he is very sick. He goes back home and his dad dies: “to my shame, I was back at work the Monday after” (43). He wants to show his previous employer how terribly they had treated him by excelling, even though he admits they did not treat him that badly. He knows he really left his job to avoid killing his creative partner, which he fears he would have done if he stayed there.

He asks one girl out, but she rebuffs him, and so he swears off women, convincing himself he also does not want to get stuck with an accidental family. He buys a house to impress KF and believes he can make money by selling it later, which turns out to be a terrible idea. He flies all over the US for business meetings and is put on a project for a car commercial, which turns out to be a “pain in the arse” (44). He feels like he has been marooned on the moon, although he is pleased not to have fallen into a wife trap. He keeps going to AA, although one center is right next to a bar that lets you drink for free for a night if you give them an AA chip.

The narrator is making $300,000 per year and feeling great, although his huge house is mostly empty. Being sober, he realizes the hurt he has caused other people, which he believes he replaced with a need to hurt himself. He tries to avoid his neighbors as much as possible. However, after a government employee knocks on his door to hand him a pamphlet on lawncare, he is forced to borrow a lawnmower from his neighbors and then talk to a gas attendant to fill it up. He hates conversing with other people in the Midwest because they always ask him where he’s from: “If you said you were Irish but from London, it was as if you had performed a method of fellatio so bizarre that their eyes would glaze over” (49).

His boss tries to hook the narrator up with women and the narrator believes this to be his boss’s attempt to make sure he stays in Minnesota, and at the agency, forever. However, the narrator admits that he might be paranoid in this regard. He plans to stay at KF for a year but ends up stuck there for two, even though he feels trapped after only three months.

The narrator reflects on his paranoia, including how he thought Pen was paying people to follow him and how he can’t see a therapist because he wouldn’t trust him/her. He now lives in New York and reflects on how he almost committed suicide after Aisling rejected him. He remembers looking out from his New York KF office window and thinking about jumping. He recalls moving to New York to be with Aisling, whom he believes he loves. She, however, just wants to be friends.

The narrator reflects on how cold the Minnesota winters are, including the myth that it gets so cold you can throw coffee into the air and it will freeze before it hits the ground. His friend from Texas, who lived with him for a bit, tried it once, despite the narrator’s protestations, and the Texan ends up throwing boiling water on himself. The narrator finds himself angry at fat Minnesotans who say stupid things.

The narrator offers, “Combine my celibacy with my Arctic experiment and you’ve got a potent cocktail of pent-up aggression and self-denial” (60). He remembers understanding the urge to go into McDonald’s with an Uzi, as he is stressed out from his mortgage, which is eating up his otherwise lucrative salary because he is only paying rent on the loan. He barely breaks even when he sells the house. In the meantime, he waits for London newspapers and watches French films, to connect himself to culture and civilization. He is terrified he will begin to pick up inane Midwestern idioms. He reflects on the hallucinations that come from hypothermia and how he can’t marry someone else because he is married to himself. He tries to sell his house but cannot and becomes convinced that his company is trying to keep him in their family and preventing people from making offers on the house.

The narrator uses masturbation and the AA mantra of one-day-at-a-time to counteract his homicidal depression. He goes to visit his mother for Christmas and they are both still in shock from his father’s passing. He goes to AA and tells his story of hurting people. A young blonde girl comes up to thank him for sharing, and then tells him about Aisling, who does the same thing to men and knows about the narrator. The girl never mentions Aisling’s name, only her stepfather’s, who happens to be the narrator’s father’s solicitor. The narrator believes the girl to be crazy.

The narrator feels drained at his job and resolves to get out. Summer finally comes, along with “the girls. Unbelievable Aryan examples of breast and thigh” (73). But all these women have huge engagement rings, which they politely flash at him while he leers. The narrator despises the mosquitoes and the lack of air conditioning, which he attributes to American social unrest. He hears a story about a couple who goes camping and accidentally sprays themselves with insect attractant, thinking it to be repellent; they are found dead, covered in bites. He masturbates to visions of dumb girls in bathing suits. He despises the car commercial work he is doing but goes to a photo shoot in New York and is enchanted by the autumnal city. In the hotel, he watches porn paid for by his company and is treated very nicely by the people he works with in New York.

On one of the shoots, he meets Aisling, who offers to show him around: “I really thought she was too young. Dangerously young” (79). Aisling gives the narrator her number, and he calls to ask her to dinner at the same place he took another girl a few nights before. He does not realize he is attracted to Aisling but thinks it the gentlemanly thing to do, since their fathers knew each other.